Game: Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness

Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness (ECC from now on) is a puzzle game where you try to unravel a mess to reveal a pristine white grid.

What Went Right

• It’s… fun! This became a negative (read what went wrong) but it was actually fun by the end of day one.
• The removal animation gives it some flavor.
• I added in very basic logging so I can tell when players are finding things difficult. I can’t tweak the difficulty for purposes of the competition, but I will as I turn this into production-quality game.
• libGDX. It brought with it one minor negative (performance/quality of HTML port) but brought an incredible amount of positives. And I’m not even sure what other engine I could have used that would have made better html5 output without me giving up a lot of things in return.
• I created a YouTube video of my playing it shortly after the deadline and put it on the page. People do seem to get it a little better once they see it being done.
• Put the flower mode in the main menu. It originally swapped modes at level 14. According to my stats, the highest level anyone has played is 10. It would have literally been wasted if I hadn’t made this change.

What Went Wrong

• People don’t get it. My internal stats say that more than 50% of clicks in level 1 are wrong. Level 1 literally takes a single click to beat, no matter what difficulty you choose. It needs a tutorial badly. I knew this, but didn’t make the time for it.
• The HTML port is especially ugly, slow, and error-prone (if you block flash it doesn’t load at all, even though it only uses flash for audio).
• It’s ugly. It got to fun (for those who know how to play) quickly, and I spent too much of my time “play testing” or polishing mechanics instead of polishing visuals.
• I suck at marketing. I spammed Twitter and the IRC room, but have mostly failed to drum up much attention.

Early screenshot: Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness

Video of me playing it: Exploding Cubes of Cleanliness